NARCIS connects to the Research Software Directory

Software now officially listed as a research output

Carlos Martinez-Ortiz
Netherlands eScience Center
2 min readOct 1, 2019

While research software is increasingly recognised as an important output of the research process, making research software discoverable is still a challenge most researchers face.

The Netherlands eScience Center has created the Research Software Directory (RSD), a content management system that helps improve discoverability. The system is open source, so other organisations can publish their software in their own copy of the RSD.

DANS and the Netherlands eScience Center joined forces in the “FAIR Software Route” project in 2018. The goal is to create an online step-by-step plan that helps scientific software developers to create and store their software in a Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) way. As part of this project, the Research Software Directory has been extended to allow harvesting of its metadata by NARCIS, the gateway to scholarly information in the Netherlands. Thanks to this integration, research software is now officially listed as a research output, on equal footing with publications and data.

The “FAIR Software Route” website will be presented by DANS and eScience Center at the eScience Symposium this November.

Watch our RSD promotional video!

More information

See also New in NARCIS: scientific software. For more information or questions about this joint project, please contact Jason Maassen from the Netherlands eScience Center or Cees Hof from DANS.

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Published in Netherlands eScience Center

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